Arkansas

by David Leavitt

  “What movie did you see last night?” Jean asked.

  “Oh, we didn’t end up going to a movie. We just had coffee.”

  “Gary’s a nice fellow.”

  “I forgot to tell you,” my father said. “That other friend of yours phoned last night. Andy, is that his name? And he says he’s in the Andes.” He laughed.

  “I know. He’s making a movie.”

  “He left a number. I’m not sure what the time difference is, but I can check.”

  “Don’t worry. I can’t call him back now anyway. I’ve got to get to the library.”

  “You certainly seem to be working hard these days,” Jean said. Then she took her cup of tea up to her study. My father started the Times crossword puzzle. “Younger son of a Spanish monarch,” he read aloud. “Seven letters.”

  “Infante,” I said. Needless to say, it worried me to imagine him searching my room top to bottom: had he discovered the stash of pornography in the dresser drawer?

  After that I left for the library. You will notice that in my account of these weeks I have not made a single reference to the act of writing, even though it is the ostensible source of my income and reputation. Well, the sad truth was, for close to a year, my entire literary output had consisted of one book review and two pages of a short story (abandoned). Research was my excuse, yet I wasn’t really interested in my research either, and so when I got to the library that morning I bypassed the 1890s altogether, opting instead for a battered copy of Furbank’s biography of Forster. According to Furbank, Forster met James only once, when he was in his late twenties. The master, “rather fat but fine, and effectively bald,” confused him with G. E. Moore, while “the beautiful Mrs. von Glehn” served tea. Yet even as Forster felt “all that the ordinary healthy man feels in the presence of a lord,” James moved him less than the young laborer he encountered on the way home from Lamb House, smoking and leaning against a wall. Of this laborer, he wrote in a poem,

  No youthful flesh weighs down your youth.

  You are eternal, infinite,

  You are the unknown, and the truth.

  And he also wrote,

  For those within the room, high talk,

  Subtle experience—for me

  That spark, that darkness, on the walk.

  Poor Forster! I thought. He’d never had an easy time of it; had passed his most virile years staring at handsome youths from a needful distance while his mother dragged him in the opposite direction. Rooms “where culture unto culture knelt” beckoned him, but something else beckoned him as well, and the call of that something—“that spark, that darkness, on the walk”—he hadn’t been able to answer until late in his life. No, I decided, he wouldn’t have warmed much to James, that conscientious objector in the wars of sexuality, exempted from battle by virtue of his “obscure hurt.” (How coy, how typically Jamesian, that phrase!) Whereas Forster, dear Forster, was in his own way the frankest of men. Midway through his life, in a New Year’s assessment, he wrote, “The anus is clotted with hairs, and there is a great loss of sexual power—it was very violent 1920-22.” He gathered signatures in support of Radclyffe Hall when The Well of Loneliness was banned, while James distanced himself from Oscar Wilde during his trials, fearful lest the association should taint. And this seems natural: fear, in the Jamesian universe, seems natural. Whereas Forster would have betrayed his country before he betrayed his friend.

  I closed the Furbank. I was trying to remember the last time a boy had inspired me to write a poem. Ages, I realized; a decade. And now, out of the blue, here was Eric, neither beautiful nor wise, physically indifferent to me, yet capable of a crude, affectionate sincerity that cut straight through reason to strum the very fibers of my poetry-making aeolian heart. Oh, Eric! I wanted to sing. Last night I was happy. I’d forgotten what it was like to be happy. Because for years, it has just been anxiety and antidotes to anxiety, numbing consolations that look like happiness but exist only to bandage, to assuage; whereas happiness is never merely a bandage; happiness is newborn every time, impulsive and fledgling every time. Happiness, yes! As if a shoot, newly uncurled, were moving in growth toward the light of your pale eyes!

  I got up from where I was sitting. I walked to the nearest pay phone and called him.

  “Hello?” he said groggily.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No problem.” A loud yawn. “What time is it anyway? Shit, eleven.” A sound of nose-blowing. “So what’s the word, Dave?”

  “I’ve decided to do it.”

  “Great.”

  “You need the paper Tuesday, right? Well, what say I come by your place Monday night?”

  “Not here. My roommate’s sister’s visiting.”

  “Okay. Then how about we meet somewhere else?”

  “As long as it’s off campus.”

  I suggested the Ivy, a gay coffee bar in West Hollywood that Eric had never heard of, and he agreed.

  “Till Monday, then.”

  “Later.”

  He hung up.

  I went back to my carrel. I gathered up all the 1890s research books I’d kept on hold and dumped them in the return bin. (They fell to the bottom with a gratifying thunk.) Then I went into the literature stacks and pulled out some appealingly threadbare editions of A Room with a View and Daisy Miller, which I spent the afternoon rereading. Believe me or not as you choose: only four times did I get up: once for a candy bar, once for lunch, twice to go to the bathroom. And what a surprise! These books, which I hadn’t looked at for years, steadied and deepened the happiness Eric had flamed in me. It had been too long, I realized, since I’d read a novel that wasn’t by one of my contemporaries, a novel that smelled old. Now, sitting in that library near a window through which the fall sun occasionally winked, a naive pleasure in reading reawoke in me. I smiled when Miss Bartlett was unequal to the bath. I smiled when the Reverend Beebe threw off his clothes and dived into the sacred lake. And when Randolph Miller said, “You bet,” and the knowing Winterboume “reflected on that depth of Italian subtlety, so strangely opposed to Anglo-Saxon simplicity, which enables people to show a smoother surface in proportion as they’re more acutely displeased.” That was good. That was James at his best. Oh, literature, literature! —I was singing again— it was toward your pantheon that fifteen years ago, for the first time, I inclined my reading eyes: hot the world of lawsuits and paperback floors, the buzz and the boom and the bomb; no, it was this joy I craved, potent as the fruity perfume of a twenty-year-old boys unwashed sheets.

  That afternoon—again, you can believe me or not, as you choose—I read until dinnertime.

  “Dad, are you using your computer?” I asked when I got home.

  “Not tonight.”

  “Mind if I do?”

  From his crossword puzzle he looked up at me, a bit surprised if truth be told, for it had been many weeks since I’d made such a request.

  “Help yourself,” he said. “There should be paper in the printer.”

  “Thanks.” And going into his study, I switched on the machine, so that within a few seconds that all too familiar simulacrum of the blank page was confronting me.

  Very swiftly—blankness can be frightening—I typed:

  “That Spark, That Darkness on the Walk”:

  Responses to Italy in Daisy Miller and A Room with a View

  by Eric Steinberg

  After which I leaned back and looked admiringly at my title.

  Good, I thought, now to begin writing. And did.

  I dressed up for my meeting with Eric at the Ivy that Monday. First I got a haircut; then I bathed and shaved; then I put on a new beige vest I’d bought at Banana Republic, a white Calvin Klein shirt, and fresh jeans. And at the risk of sounding immodest, I must say that the effect worked: I looked good, waiting for him in that little oasis of homosexual civility with my cappuccino and my copy of Where Angels Fear to Tread. Except that it hardly mattered. Eric arrived late, and only stayed five minutes. His eyes were gla
zed, his hair unwashed, his green down vest gave off a muddy smell, as if it had been left out in the rain.

  “Man, I feel like shit” was his greeting as he sat down.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I haven’t slept in three nights. I’ve got this huge econ project due Wednesday. Airline deregulation.”

  “You want some coffee?”

  “I have had so much coffee in the last twenty-four hours!” He rubbed his eyes.

  We were silent for a few seconds. Waiting, I’d been curious to know what he’d make of the Ivy, the clientele of whom consisted pretty exclusively of West Hollywood homos. Now I saw that he wasn’t awake enough to notice.

  “So do you have it?” he asked presently.

  “Yeah, I have it.” Reaching into my briefcase, I handed him the paper. “Seventeen pages, footnoted and typed in perfect accordance with MLA style rules.”

  Eric thumbed through the sheets. “Great,” he said, scanning. “Yeah, this is just the sort of shit Professor Yearwood’ll eat up.”

  Stuffing the paper into his backpack, he stood.

  “Well, thanks, Dave. Gotta run.”

  “Already?”

  “Like I said, I’ve got this econ project due.”

  “But I thought...”

  My voice trailed off into silence.

  “Oh, that,” Eric said, smiling. “After I get my grade. I mean, what if she gives me a D?” He winked. “Oh, and after I’m done with fucking airline deregulation. Well, later.”

  He was gone.

  Rather despondently, I finished my cappuccino.

  Well, you’ve learned your lesson, a voice inside me said. Ripped off again. And not only that, you can never tell anyone. It would be too embarrassing.

  I know, I know.

  Alas, it was not the first time this voice had given me such a lecture.

  I drove home. My father and Jean were out. Locking myself in the guest room, I took off my Banana Republic vest, my Calvin Klein shirt, my no longer fresh jeans. Then I got into bed and called the phone sex line, a particularly desperate form of consolation, to which I had not resorted for several weeks. And as is usual in that eyeless world (Andy calls it “Gaza”), various men were putting each other through panting, frenetic paces on which I couldn’t concentrate; no, I couldn’t concentrate on “the bunkhouse” by which one caller was obsessed, or the massage scenario another seemed intent on reenacting. Finally, feeling heartbroken and a little peevish, I hung up on Jim from Silverlake in the middle of his orgasm, after which I lay in bed with the lights on, staring at the vase from which the society garlic had been emptied; the phone, smug on its perch, coy as a cat, not ringing; of course it wasn’t ringing. For Eric had his paper, and so there was no reason he would call me tonight or tomorrow night or ever. Nor would I chase him down. Like Mary Haines in The Women, I had my pride. He’d get his A. And probably it was better that way, since after all, the terms of the arrangement were that he would let me suck him off once, and if I sucked him off once, I’d probably want to suck him off twice; and then I’d want him to do it to me, which he wouldn’t. Falling in love with straight boys—it’s the tiredest of homosexual clichés; in addition to which Los Angeles circa 1994 was a far cry from Florence circa 1894, from that quaint Italian world to which Lord Henry Somerset had decamped after his divorce, that world in which almost any boy that caught your eye could be had, joyously, for a few lire, and without fear of blackmail or arrest. And though they would eventually marry and father children, those boys, at least they had that quaint old Italian openness to pleasure. I’d thought Eric had it too. But now I saw that more likely, he viewed his body as something to be transacted. He knew what a paper was worth—and he knew what he was worth; what his freshness and frankness were worth, when compared with some limp piece of faggot cock from the Circus of Books; some tired-out, overworked piece of dick; the bitter flavor of latex. (Do I cause offense? I won’t apologize; it was what I felt.)

  And in the morning, I did not go to the library at all. Made not even the slightest pretense of behaving like a writer. Instead I spent the whole day wandering the city. (The low business in which I got myself involved need not be catalogued here.)

  Likewise the next day. And the next.

  Then Eric called me.

  At first, glancing at the Librax pad, I didn’t quite believe it. I thought perhaps it was another Eric—except that I recognized his number.

  “Dave, my man!” he said when I phoned him back. “You have got the Midas touch!”

  “What?”

  “An A, man! A fucking A! And an A-on my econ project!” I heard him inhale.

  “That’s great, Eric. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. So now that you’ve done your part, I’m ready to do mine.”

  “Oh?”

  “What, you’re surprised?”

  “Well—”

  “Dave, I’m disappointed in you! I mean, do you really think I’m the kind of guy who’d let you write his paper and then just, you know, blow you off?”

  “No, of course not—”

  “On the contrary. You’re the one who’s going to do the blowing. You just tell me when, man.”

  I blushed. “Well, tonight would be okay.”

  “Both roommates away for the weekend. Plus I’ve got some great pot. I bought it to celebrate.”

  “Fantastic. So—I’ll come over.”

  “Cool. See you in a few.” He hung up.

  Feeling a little shaky, I took a shower and changed my clothes. By now the beige vest from Banana Republic had gotten stretched out, and the Calvin Klein shirt had a ketchup stain on it. Still, I put them on.

  “Hey, Dave,” he said at his door half an hour later. And patted me on the shoulder. Eric was drinking a Corona; had put Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the stereo.

  “Hey, Eric. You’re certainly looking good.” By which I meant he looked awake. He’d washed his hair, put on fresh clothes. On top of which he smelled soapy and young in that way that no cologne can replicate.

  “I feel good," Eric said. “Last night I slept fourteen hours. Before that, I hadn’t slept in a week.” He motioned me upstairs. “And you? What have you been up to? Hard at work on another bestseller?”

  “Oh, in a manner of speaking.”

  We went into his room, where he shuffled through the pile of papers on his desk. “Here it is,” he said after a few seconds. “I thought you’d want to see this.” And he handed me my paper.

  On the back, in a very refined script, Mary Yearwood had written the following:

  Eric: I must confess that as I finish reading your paper, I find myself at something of a loss for words. It is really first-rate writing. Your analysis of both texts is graceful and subtle, in addition to which—and this is probably what impresses me most—you incorporate biographical and historical evidence into your argument in a manner that enriches the reader’s understanding of the novels (in my view Daisy Miller must be looked upon as a novel) without ever seeming to intrude on their integrity as works of art. Also, your handling of the (homo)sexual underpinnings in both the James and Forster oeuvres is extremely deft, never polemical. And that extraordinary early poem of Forster’s! Wherever did you find it? I applaud your research skills as well as your sensitivity to literary nuance.

  Looking back at your midterm, I have trouble believing the same student wrote this paper. Never in my career have I seen such a growth spurt. Clearly the tension of the exam room strangles your creativity (as it did mine). Therefore I have decided to exempt you from the final. The paper, thought out quietly in privacy, is the form for you, and so I shall assess your future performance purely on that basis.

  Last but not least, if you’re not averse, I’d like to nominate this paper for several departmental prizes. And if you have a chance, why don’t you stop by my office hours next week? Have you thought of graduate school? I’d like to discuss the possibility with you.

  Grade: A

/>   I put the paper down.

  “So?” Eric said.

  “I guess she liked it,” I said.

  “Liked it! She went apeshit.” Kicking off his shoes, he sat down on the bed and started working on a joint. “You know, when I first read that part about the midterm, I choked. I thought, Shit, she’ll say it’s too good, someone else must have done it. But she didn’t. She bought it!”

  “I tried hard to make it sound, you know, like something a very smart college junior might write. I mean, as opposed to something Elizabeth Hardwick or Susan Sontag might write."

  “And now I don’t even have to take the final!” He laughed almost brutally. “Stanford Biz School, here I come! You really slung it, Dave.”

  “Well,” I said.

  My pulse quickened.

  Very casually he put down the joint, unbuttoned and took off his shirt. Then his T-shirt.

  He lay back. What a friend of mine called a “crab ladder” of hairs crawled from his belt up over his navel to disappear between small, brown nipples.

  He lit the joint, took a puff.

  “Dave Leavitt, come on down,” he said. “You’re the next contestant on the new Price Is Right. ”

  He started taking off his socks.

  “Let me do that for you,” I said.

  And did. I licked his feet.

  Above me, I heard him exhale. Reaching up, I felt his warm stomach rise and fall.